I agree that the PAX shutdown is an ominous development. Nobody's internet access is perfectly free from the kinds of pressures that were brought against PAX. What steps can we take to keep the same thing from happening to us?
I agree with Karl that a big step would be to spread remailers more widely. Eric Hollander is running three remailers in addition to the ones Karl mentioned - hh@soda.berkeley.edu, and two other machines which I don't have handy. They don't encrypt but they forward, and that's good enough for many purposes.
Some time back, there was mention that the owner of the commercial Portal system would run one. Could someone follow up on that who knows him?
PGP is gradually disappearing from U.S. sites where it used to be available. Recently it got taken off the EFF area on Compuserve. We can't afford to see encryption and remailers be slowly strangled.
Hal 74076.1041@compuserve.com
If it turns out that pressure to shut down really did come from the official net hierarchy, there are other places on the net which should be nearly immune from that kind of pressure. There are thousands of UUCP sites which predate the Internet. And anyone getting their connectivity from one of the commercial providers (PSI, UUNET, ANS, etc.) can theoretically use those networks for whatever purposes they choose. ----- Brian McBee ----- (503)378-4276 ----- brian@opac.osl.or.gov ----- ----- Oregon State Library, State Library Building, Salem, OR 97310 ----- Plan globally, attack locally